City, county talk 'divorce' over sewers

Hamilton County administrator Christian Sigman (left) and County Commissioner Chris Monzel, right, listen to city officials during an Enquirer editorial board meeting on Monday.(Photo: The Enquirer/Kareem Elgazzar)

A meeting Monday about the future of Hamilton County's sewer district sounded a little like a couple's therapy session.

If the number of "divorce" references was any indication, it could have gone better.

On one side, Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley, City Manager Harry Black and others from the city made the case for stronger city leadership over the Metropolitan Sewer District. On the other, County Commissioner Chris Monzel, County Administrator Christian Sigman and others from the county made the case for the county to take control of the sewer agency.

The two groups, which met with The Enquirer's editorial board Monday, currently are part of an increasingly strained marriage. The county owns the sewer district and the city runs it, but they don't agree on how best to operate the sewer district and they both blame the other for a lack of oversight that has resulted in delayed projects and questionable spending, millions of dollars of which was revealed last week by The Enquirer.

They did agree on at least one thing: the relationship is in sorry shape and they'll be heading to court soon.

It's hard to argue with those gloomy assessments, given the past several years of acrimony and fighting in federal court over MSD and the soaring rate hikes that have hit the agency's 800,000 customers hard.

Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters has even put together a book chronicling the troubled relationship. The book, obtained through a public records request, includes several years of emails and memos sent between county and city officials related to MSD.

Those communications reveal how the professional relationship between city and county employees has become unproductive and often testy.

"I do not understand why you keep wasting my time with repeated requests for information that my staff already provided to you," MSD Director Gerald Checco wrote in an email last September to the county's on-site monitor.

A month later, Sigman warned the city to stop blaming the county for its problems and to focus instead on improving management of the agency. "I am especially concerned that the city administration is electing to blame the county for delays as a smokescreen to hide the reality that city management decisions are adding unnecessary costs and delays to major projects," Sigman wrote in a memo to Black last October.

At the meeting Monday, Monzel and Cranley said they see their disagreements over MSD moving to federal court soon. That's largely because the agreement that created this marriage, signed in 1968 when everyone was getting along better, is due to expire in 2018.

Both sides described what would happen next as a divorce, but neither could say exactly what that split would look like.

Cranley suggested it might be possible for the city and county to operate two separate sewer systems. After almost 50 years together, however, divvying up assets and responsibilities would be an epic task.

For one thing, both the city and county are connected by a federal consent decree that requires more than $3 billion in sewer repairs to stop sewage from running into basements and waterways. "Even if we get divorced, we're still bound together by the consent decree," Cranley said.

There's also the question of how a separation would occur when so much of the district's operations are intertwined, from treatment plants to pipes to pumping stations. Living apart would be far more difficult for the city and county than for a typical divorcing couple.

County officials say they have the upper hand because a federal judge ruled in 2014 that the county is MSD's owner and the city is, essentially, its contractor. Yet the city manages the district and the agency's employees are city workers. A simple hand-over of control would be immensely complicated.

A federal judge ultimately will have to decide what to do. Possibilities include giving one side or the other greater control, splitting up the sewer district, or creating an oversight board to try to make recommendations and work out conflicts.

The stakes are highest for ratepayers, who have seen the average sewer bill increase from about $250 a year to almost $1,000 in about a decade.

City and county officials say the current relationship isn't serving those ratepayers well. It's why, they say, something must be done soon.